Eye-Fi Explore review

The WiFi uploading Eye-Fi SD card made a big splash when it was first introduced, but now Eye-Fi has a whole line of different products. The top of the line is the Eye-Fi Explore, which supports geotagging without using a GPS. Instead of GPS hardware, it uses the Skyhook Wireless Wi-Fi Postitioning System, which correlates the position of the Eye-Fi’s access point to GPS locations, creating virtual GPS functionality. This allows photos taken with the Eye-Fi to be be geotagged. Of course, the accuracy of the system is noticeably lower than true GPS and seems to be affected by a number of external factors, but it is still accurate enough to tag the photo within the immediate vicinity of where it was taken.

WiFi positioning is great feature, but certainly not limited to photography. Since the Eye-Fi is at its core SD storage media, you could probably have it geotag data saved to the card, even if it wasn’t created by a digital camera..

Not only is this not a hack, it isn’t even a real review. The picture he took with the camera was _not_ the picture which showed up in flickr. That picture was not sitting on the chair shooting through the railing.

What, he couldn’t even be bothered to get the thing working correctly before doing this “review”?

For the previous comment… he set the VIDEO camera down, which had the view of the railing, while he took a picture with the REGULAR camera. Obviously, he was standing, and well above where the camera would have a view of the railing. Wow. Use some common since.

Yeah, I agree.. get a clue dude. He filmed the video with a VIDEO camera… the eye-fi is an SD card for a STILL camera. Didn’t you notice that the VIDEO camera was filming him putting the eye-fi into the STILL camera on the table? Are you that dumb? He set down the VIDEO camera that he was talking to us through and shot a picture OVER the balcony with the STILL camera.

Okay, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about and it’s way to late in the evening. Of course H.264 itself doesn’t contain that kind of metadata, but maybe the MPEG-4 Part 14, or MP4, container does.

Buyer Beware: I had one of these Eye-Fi cards die on me within a month of owning it, taking a lot of important photos to the grave with it. This problem has been happening to a huge number of Eye-Fi users, and of course in nearly every case photos are lost. Basically, assume every shot you take onto this card has a 50/50 chance of surviving long enough to end up on your computer.